Panning query, please?

Support & Help Requests
#1

Hello Folks.
At some time soon I'd like to make a change to my display such that the desktop is bigger than my physical screen and it moves when I move the mouse cursor to its edges.

Searching for 'panning' here was hilarious as apparently that function sees it as the same as 'panel' and that was all it returned.

Searching generally brought me to this:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution#Panning_viewport

Which says:>

Panning viewport

If you want to have a panning viewport, i.e., a virtual screen that's bigger than your physical screen that moves when you move the mouse to the edge ("zoomed in" view) specify the desired physical resolution with --mode and the virtual screen size with --fb and panning area (typically same as virtual screen size) with --panning.

For example,

$ xrandr --output VGA1 --rate 60 --mode 800x600 --fb 1280x1024 --panning 1280x1024

Which looks good but of course I have no idea if there are specifics pertaining to Mate which may be missing or if there are other details I should know - so I'm asking for help from those who may know alot better than myself here.

Thanks for any helpful replies !!

#2

May be
http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2017/04/custom-screen-resolution-ubuntu-desktop/
will help?

#3

I tried this on my old laptop last night and this morning. After first running
xrandr in the terminal and finding that my laptop screen was LVDS-1 in MATE 18.04, I used the following command to get a larger panning area - xrandr --output LVDS-1 --rate 60 --mode 1280x800 --fb 1280x920 --panning 1280x920

I then tried xrandr -s 1280x800 to reset the screen back to normal. This resulted in about a half second of black screen before resetting.

I finally tried xrandr --output LVDS-1 --rate 60 --mode 1280x800 --fb 1280x800 --panning 1280x800 and that reset the screen without the annoying blackness part.

Good luck computerguy.

#4

Just to let you know, after using panning several times, I then plugged in a larger secondary monitor and experienced a poor screen. The two separate screens were merged into one with all sorts of difficulties. To fix this, I logged out and back in and the screen situation resolved itself.

#5

Thanks for your replies to my query Mdooley !!
That is great confirmation of it working with this DE.

My main concern in asking was aimed at whether there might be some additional info or oddities in the process...which appears to work well enough.

I do not aim to have a 2nd screen - rather, I wish to maybe add another 25% to each 'side' of the existing display area if possible such that I can scroll between several open apps without having them on top of each other.

Thanks also to Ugnvs for replying, though that page makes no mention of panning at all.